How important is money? It’s a question that preoccupies many of us in the turbulence of economic disaster, and this month’s books address it from different angles. Does money matter more than love, religious faith, memory or virtue?

The Street Sweeper (Faber, £14.99), the third novel by the Australian writer Elliot Perlman, has been generating much advance praise, and is being tipped as a contender for the Man Booker prize. A big, bold international work with a piercing moral sense, it follows the lives of three men, and encompasses aspects of the Holocaust, the seldom told story of African-American soldiers in the second world war and the birth of the American civil rights movement. As in his previous novel Seven Types of Ambiguity, Perlman’s unforced sympathy for characters who are not immediately attractive individuals is striking and enlightening. The story centres upon Lamont Williams, an African-American convict on probation,